Amazon to Remove Encryption Features from Kindle Fire Devices
Amazon, the ecommerce giant, is mulling to remove encryption capabilities of its Kindle Fire devices.
The news has not come as a surprise, as the company behind Kindle Fire has been working towards relieving its Kindle devices from the burden of encryption. The company holds the point of view that the decision to remove encryption was not a new one. And that it has nothing to do with the recent Apple-related legal episode.
Privacy advocates on the other hand have criticized Amazon’s move to remove encryption from its Kindle devices in the wake of the recent legal standoff.
One of the encryption feature that is going to be removed from Kindle is that of providing a personal identification number (PIN) to encrypt the Kindle device. And if, a user enters a wrong PIN for 30 times in succession, then all of the data stored on the device will be removed or deleted. This feature is somewhat similar to the feature offered by Apple’s iPhone to encrypt the data.
The spokesperson for Amazon, Robin Handaly has said that the encryption features were already removed from the Kindle Fire OS 5 – the latest operating system that was launched in November last year.
“It was a feature few customers were actually using,” she said. Kindle Fire tablets’ communication with the company’s cloud meets its “high standards for privacy and security including appropriate use of encryption”, she added.
Digital privacy advocates have lamented Amazon’s decision, terming it an ‘incredibly poor excuse’ to discontinue a feature, as important as encryption.
“Removing device encryption due to lack of customer use is an incredibly poor excuse for weakening the security of those customers that did use the feature,” said Jeremy Gillula, staff technologist with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Given that the information stored on a tablet can be just as sensitive as that stored on a phone or on a computer, Amazon should instead be pushing to make device encryption the default – not removing it,” Gillula said.
Well, Amazon’s current stance on removing encryption from Kindle Fire OS, has not gone well with the common users and the privacy advocates. Although the removal is not influenced by recent events in the wake of Apple standoff, it seems that Amazon has given up on encryption features for its popular Kindle Fire devices.
